In-between...
Jun. 18th, 2012 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranSo, it's early evening in Kyōto, and I'm on the restaurant floor high above Kyōto station, trying to find dinner with some American and Indian friends. And I'm in "that place" again.
Choosing a place to eat is taking a little while because there are comfort zone issues involved, especially for the Indians. Japan might seem like a relatively tourist-friendly place, but it can be daunting if you don't want to eat beef or pork and you don't speak Japanese. The plastic models of different foods aren't much good if you also don't have the cultural background to know what ingredients normally go into them, and some of my friends have also already accidentally eaten ham this trip after a miscommunication in English.
We check out the displays in front of each restaurant, one by one, and I explain what the dishes are, and what the likely ingredients will be. Tonkatsu is out. Tempura is out. Sushi is right out. Spanish food is a maybe. Ramen is out. Pizza would be fine, except they went there last night.
Eventually, we settle on a reasonably cheap restaurant with a nice range of mostly vegetable-based set courses. I ask in Japanese for a table for four, and if they have an English menu, and the smiling waitress brings us a big picture menu (which, of course, doesn't list ingredients).
Right, then. I call the waitress, apologise for causing trouble, and explain that one of my friends doesn't want to eat meat. Does the tempura have any meat in it? "Oh, he's a vegetarian?" asks the waitress. Yes, I say, but prawns are okay. She double-checks with me to make sure I meant what I just said and tells me it will be no problem. Then my friend wants to know if the noodles come with egg, so I ask this too. Yes, they do, but they can be served without it. I order the set he wants (no meat, no eggs, but prawns are okay), and then repeat for my other friends (getting mixed up when one of them changes their order and we have to start from the top again). Then the waitress tells me that one of the sushi types is not available and asks if it's okay to substitute something else. Of course, it is. Then, because my friends have had trouble getting separate bills before, I ask if we can pay separately and if credit cards are okay, and the waitress happily reassures me that it will be fine. Then I order three beers and ask for forks when I realise my friends can't handle chopsticks.
All of which makes it sound like I know what I'm doing, right?
In actual fact, I speak Japanese slightly less well than the average two year old. There are times, like this one, when I might understand an entire conversation (typically in controlled circumstances like this encounter) and others where I might hear a conversation and not understand a single word. I probably could have handled the above conversation with just a vocabulary of around fifty words (the trick is knowing the right fifty words).
The same thing applies to Japan in general. I know next to nothing about Japan. Absolutely everything is an adventure to me. I can't count the number of embarrassing things I've done and the mistakes I've made and no doubt there are countless more that I'm not even aware of. The only reason I looked to my friends that I knew what I was doing (despite my protests) was that they knew even less.
This is a place that I'm sure will be familiar to many of the people on my flist. It's like standing on the narrow road between the torii of Fushimi Inari-Taisha and the glowing portal of Inari station: being on the threshold of two worlds, but not quite being in either of them. On the one side, I can see just how much I still have to learn about Japan and all the mysteries I'm still yet to fathom. And, on the other, I can see the barrier behind me that I've passed through a little, but which at the same time is starting to cut me off from my friends. All sorts of things that they are saying have started to stop making sense now. The jokes about food being "daring" or "dangerous". The way it's assumed knowledge that certain things are weird or wacky. The way they talk about the restaurant staff in English as though they didn't exist. The way they worry about tipping, but not about showing gratitude or appreciation.
When I reach for words to describe this space, I come up with adjectives like "weird" because that's how it always gets described. But, in all honesty, it's far more familiar than weird. In some respects, you could say this is where I live. It's the place where I'm most alive. Perhaps, it's also the place we all were once, when we were children, and the world was still there in front of us to be explored.
And when I'm back out of this in-between zone, more than anything else, it's where I want to return.
Choosing a place to eat is taking a little while because there are comfort zone issues involved, especially for the Indians. Japan might seem like a relatively tourist-friendly place, but it can be daunting if you don't want to eat beef or pork and you don't speak Japanese. The plastic models of different foods aren't much good if you also don't have the cultural background to know what ingredients normally go into them, and some of my friends have also already accidentally eaten ham this trip after a miscommunication in English.
We check out the displays in front of each restaurant, one by one, and I explain what the dishes are, and what the likely ingredients will be. Tonkatsu is out. Tempura is out. Sushi is right out. Spanish food is a maybe. Ramen is out. Pizza would be fine, except they went there last night.
Eventually, we settle on a reasonably cheap restaurant with a nice range of mostly vegetable-based set courses. I ask in Japanese for a table for four, and if they have an English menu, and the smiling waitress brings us a big picture menu (which, of course, doesn't list ingredients).
Right, then. I call the waitress, apologise for causing trouble, and explain that one of my friends doesn't want to eat meat. Does the tempura have any meat in it? "Oh, he's a vegetarian?" asks the waitress. Yes, I say, but prawns are okay. She double-checks with me to make sure I meant what I just said and tells me it will be no problem. Then my friend wants to know if the noodles come with egg, so I ask this too. Yes, they do, but they can be served without it. I order the set he wants (no meat, no eggs, but prawns are okay), and then repeat for my other friends (getting mixed up when one of them changes their order and we have to start from the top again). Then the waitress tells me that one of the sushi types is not available and asks if it's okay to substitute something else. Of course, it is. Then, because my friends have had trouble getting separate bills before, I ask if we can pay separately and if credit cards are okay, and the waitress happily reassures me that it will be fine. Then I order three beers and ask for forks when I realise my friends can't handle chopsticks.
All of which makes it sound like I know what I'm doing, right?
In actual fact, I speak Japanese slightly less well than the average two year old. There are times, like this one, when I might understand an entire conversation (typically in controlled circumstances like this encounter) and others where I might hear a conversation and not understand a single word. I probably could have handled the above conversation with just a vocabulary of around fifty words (the trick is knowing the right fifty words).
The same thing applies to Japan in general. I know next to nothing about Japan. Absolutely everything is an adventure to me. I can't count the number of embarrassing things I've done and the mistakes I've made and no doubt there are countless more that I'm not even aware of. The only reason I looked to my friends that I knew what I was doing (despite my protests) was that they knew even less.
This is a place that I'm sure will be familiar to many of the people on my flist. It's like standing on the narrow road between the torii of Fushimi Inari-Taisha and the glowing portal of Inari station: being on the threshold of two worlds, but not quite being in either of them. On the one side, I can see just how much I still have to learn about Japan and all the mysteries I'm still yet to fathom. And, on the other, I can see the barrier behind me that I've passed through a little, but which at the same time is starting to cut me off from my friends. All sorts of things that they are saying have started to stop making sense now. The jokes about food being "daring" or "dangerous". The way it's assumed knowledge that certain things are weird or wacky. The way they talk about the restaurant staff in English as though they didn't exist. The way they worry about tipping, but not about showing gratitude or appreciation.
When I reach for words to describe this space, I come up with adjectives like "weird" because that's how it always gets described. But, in all honesty, it's far more familiar than weird. In some respects, you could say this is where I live. It's the place where I'm most alive. Perhaps, it's also the place we all were once, when we were children, and the world was still there in front of us to be explored.
And when I'm back out of this in-between zone, more than anything else, it's where I want to return.
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no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 10:45 am (UTC)I said, when you're on land, you're in the land world, and it's a world you know. If you go into the sea, and sink down beneath the waves, then you're in a sea kingdom, and it's strange and different, but it has its rules and its ways, and eventually you will learn them, and it becomes just another place, like the land kingdom. And the same if you're *on* the sea: you're in the tiny world of life on a ship.
But standing right where the waves hit the shore, there you're in that between place, balanced right between worlds. Like you said, right between Inari station, and the red tunnel of toriii gates of the shrine. And you added an extra bit which is so right, but which I'd never thought of before nd, on the other, I can see the barrier behind me that I've passed through a little, but which at the same time is starting to cut me off from my friends. ---because moving toward something is to move away from something else.
That in-between place is the place I love best, too.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 08:31 pm (UTC)Yes, that's it exactly! I also tried to explain to a friend once (funnily enough after my last trip to Japan) as being like dipping your head into a lake. From above, all you can see is the shimmery surface, but once your face is under you can see a whole different world (even if your body is still on the shore).
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 01:28 pm (UTC)One halfway place, balanced on a watershed: When the near-first Far East restaurant opened in our WASP hometown, we took local friends, and did what you're describing, except that forks were standard, and the owner asked if anyone wanted chopsticks. Himself and I proudly nodded, all our friends looked admiring from a cultural distance -- except one ex-military who said, "Are your chopsticks Japanese or Chinese?"
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 08:38 pm (UTC)Around here, these days, I'm actually surprised when people don't know how to use chopsticks. It does still happen, of course, but far less often than it used to.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 01:17 pm (UTC)Verrrrrry true. And this makes me feel less bad about those times that I think, "I really don't know,' when I think about the whys and wherefores of various cultures.